I must have done something right because that video became the most-viewed one from the conference playlist. I also wrote up the Flutter in 30 seconds post on dev.to (which btw landed me at the #3 spot on the weekly newsletter, and earned me the top 7 badge, so yaay!)

Let's be honest. I didn't think I would get in -- but I had also signed up to co-organize the NYC version of the Global Diversity CFP Day event where we encouraged under-represented minorities in tech to submit talks!. It seemed hypocritical to not take my own advice. So I did it!

Fast forward the fateful day for acceptance/rejection notices and OMG OMG OMG.

Nitya Narasimhan

@nitya

So I'd submitted my first ever proposal to @oscon this year. Long time #wishlist conference

The exhilaration on one side, and the sheer panic on the other. I've been doing tech speaking for years but this was OSCON. And then things started to get real. The Flutter team (bless them) decided it was time to throw their release schedule into high gear.

They released the first beta at Mobile World Congress in February. Okay, so it was a beta update. No big deal. I could cope.

Flutter

@flutterio

We just announced our first beta at Mobile World Congress! Thank you to our community for helping us reach this milestone. #MWC18

Turns out it was a significant update, but the migration path was not bad. The Flutter team had very considerately made it the first order of business to ship their SDK with a '''flutter''' CLI that made updates as easy as typing '''flutter upgrade'''.

By now I was convinced this was a technology worth paying attention to. So in April 2018, I ran a mini Flutter workshop at IWDNYC 2018. Given I had scheduled workshops on Glitch and Public Speaking in parallel, I expected a tiny audience and scheduled this for the smallest room. I was wrong. We had a packed room and an awesome time!

We got a Material Design refresh - and wait! Flutter is now a first-class target for Material Design Components development (alongside Android, iOS and web)? This is huge. And Will Larche and Mary Xia's talk was a fantastic walkthrough of that this meant in practice. (Bonus points: I recently found out Will is based out of Google NYC! Yaay!)

Nitya Narasimhan

@nitya

#io18*This* is the @flutterio talk I came for! Will (Material Design team) and Mary (Flutter team) walking us through live adapting app (Shrine) to do material theming.

💯💯♥️

15:57 PM - 09 May 2018

718

Then it was an exercise in live coding with double the dose of developer advocates named Emily. The amazing Emily Shack and Emily Fortuna walked us through a fairly rich mobile app built with Flutter and Firebase -- in just 310 lines of code.

And finally the talk you need to watch if you want to understand how state management works in Flutter, and how to think about UI design as an exercise in widget composition. Filip Hracek and John Sullivan did a fantastic job diving into the architectural elements that make this framework reactive.

It's been a busy few months but my Oscon 2018 talk happens in just under two months -- and a lot has changed since I submitted that proposal.

So I decided to start the Flutter.FYI blog -- both as a resource for tracking my own insights from exploring this space, and as a resource I can point to for those who attend my talks or events, and want to learn more.

Shameless Plug

Flutter will be the focus of a 2-hour study group session at the upcoming GDG NYC I/O Extended 2018 event on June 4, 2018. We are also planning a full-day FlutterCamp workshop for later this month; the date is tentatively set to Jun 9, 2018 -- but we still need to work out sponsorship and logistics, so stay tuned.

If you live in the Greater NYC area and are working on Flutter, please do post comments and get in touch! I'd love to connect and chat, and potentially have you come speak at our events or mentor beginners at #FlutterCamp.

I have to say -- y'all have done such an amazing job on the editor for dev.to. It was a joy to compose, preview and ship a fairly long article with just a few quick liquid-tag inserts and markdown magic. You make me want to write more, longer posts!

I created a dedicated Twitter profile for Flutter.FYI so I could have a clean feed that posts only Flutter related articles and resources (my personal one @nitya
covers a lot of ground).

If you find my posts on #Flutter valuable, do follow that one. I'm going to try to amplify things from dev.to as well (love this community).

More importantly though, I want to understand what questions folks have so I can spelunk those topics and write up deep-dive responses or share code snippets and demos to clarify that (to myself, and hopefully to you). So if you have any questions, please do share them either by tagging @flutterfyi or using #flutterfyi. I plan to monitor that account more than my personal one, for at least the next few weeks.

Flutter FYI

@flutterfyi

Welcome to #FlutterFYI - a resource for supporting exploration of the @flutterio framework from Google through articles, videos, tutorials and training events. Flutter is fun, functional and free to use. You just need to be fearless.